5 Simple Ways to Reclaim Disk Space

Sometimes, there are applications on your Mac that devour up all that precious disk space, leaving you with not much storage for documents, music, and other applications. These apps sometimes do so without any indication, which can be frustrating when you're in desperate need of a few extra megabytes. Read on to find out how to reclaim that disk space and keep those apps from occupying your Mac.

1. Delete iTunes Duplicates

If you rarely monitor your iTunes library, chances are that you have more than a few duplicate files. Luckily, iTunes can help you track down and remove these duplicate songs, videos, podcasts, and more.

All of the duplicate files for that particular library section will be shown. You can delete any of the files you see by selecting the item and pressing the Delete on your keyboard. You can select multiple files by holding down Command and clicking on multiple files.

To get back to the standard iTunes view, click the "Display All" button in the footer.

If the built-in duplicate search in iTunes is a little too limited for your taste, be sure to check out a $15 app called Dupin.

2. Remove Old iMovie Flicks

If you create videos with iMovie, there's a good chance that the app is hogging space on your drive with unused video, especially if you import High Definition videos on a regular basis.

To delete videos in iMovie, open the application and Command + click on all of the events in the Events Library you wish to remove. After doing that, press Command + Delete on your keyboard.

In the resulting dialog, click Delete Unused to delete any of the selected videos that are not currently part of an iMovie project; or, click Delete to remove all selected events and their videos.

3. Delete Old iChat Logs

Unless you told it not to, iChat saves chat logs (found in iChat > Preferences > Message, and clicking on Save chat transcripts). Those can eat up hundreds of megabytes of space--that's enough storage for more than 50 pictures.

While these files are handy in a work setting (to refresh your mind about a particular conversation), you may find it beneficial to remove them after a length of time has passed in order to converse disk space.

By default, the chat logs are saved in Documents > iChats, in folders named by date. You can remove the oldest ones by selecting them and dragging them to the Trash in Mac OS x.

4. Get Rid of Mail Downloads

If you receive a lot of email attachments through POP or IMAP email in Apple Mail, these attachments may be hogging space on your Mac, even though you aren't using them.

You can see (and delete) these attachments by opening a Finder window pressing Command + Shift + G and typing in:

~/Library/Mail Downloads

Once typed, click "Go." In the resulting folder, you will find all of the Mail attachments that are being stored on your system. You can manually delete them from this folder.

5. Reset Safari

Some of Safari's features can take up valuable disk space on your Mac. From the cache that makes webpages load snappier to the webpage previews that let you browse the web in style, when these files get too big they affect the performance of the browser.

First thing is to navigate to Safari > Reset Safari. In the resulting dialog, option + click on the first checkbox to de-select any of the selected options. When reseting Safari on a regular basis, we recommend checking:

- Remove all webpage preview images

- Clear the Downloads window

- Remove all website icons

You can optionally select any other items, and then click the Reset button.

Something that bothered me for a long time was an issue I was having with iTunes displaying certain songs as duplicates, when in reality ,they were probably the same song title, same band, but recorded on different albums. (i.e. studio vs. live album).

I noticed that when select "File" from the menu bar in iTunes, and hold the option key down, "Display Duplicates" becomes "Display Exact Duplicates". This option only shows the songs with ALL of the same information, most likely a song that is actually a duplicate.

From there, it was easy to delete the extra songs that I had in my library. Allowed me to weed out 70 songs (around 5MB for each song = 350 MB).

What about the utilities that claim to "trim" apps already installed that may contain code for non 64-bit systems & are larger than necessary? I'm kind of skeptical to go messing with full on applications like that, although I guess with a good Time Machine backup first it might be worth a shot.